Master of ceremonies Paul Burmeister said there was a reason a number of local celebrities were involved with the Iowa Games opening ceremony Friday at Jack Trice Stadium.

They enjoy athletic competition.

“For people like me, the opportunities end too early in life,” said Burmeister, a quarterback at the University of Iowa in the early 1990s.

Officials estimated about 17,000 Iowans took advantage of some rare opportunities during the weekend’s 17th annual Iowa Games.

Many of those athletes were introduced to a crowd of more than 8,000 Friday in an Olympic-style parade of athletes.

A skydiving exhibition and the lighting of the Iowa Games flame, with accompanying fireworks, bookended the rest of the ceremony, as Iowa Games executive director Jim Hallihan and opera singer and Centerville native Simon Estes spoke.

“You never know what sports will do for you,” said Estes, an adjunct professor of music at Iowa State. Participating in high school sports, he said, contributed to his growth as an opera singer, because he was able to improve his endurance.

“Look what sports has done for so many people around the world,” he said. “[S]ports transcends all the walls and barriers that we have out there.”

Hallihan, thanking volunteer coaches and officials for their commitments, encouraged the crowd to remember the value of fun, personal improvement and time with friends or children in the various sports.

“[Children] quit when they don’t get to play and when they get criticized,” he said.

Charlie Wittmack, a Des Moines man who in May became the first Iowan to scale Mount Everest, carried the Iowa Games torch into the stadium and lit the cauldron on the southeast hillside after Estes led the crowd in reciting the Oath of Athletes and the Oath of Parents and Coaches.

After the flame rose up, Estes paused a moment, then rumbled in his distinct bass-baritone, “Let the games begin!”